Ola interview experience Real time questions & tips from candidates to crack your interview

SDE - 2

Ola
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4 rounds | 5 Coding problems

Interview preparation journey

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Preparation
Duration: 1 Month
Topics: Data Structures, Algorithms, System Design, Concurrency, OOPS
Tip
Tip

Tip 1 : Practice Questions from different topics regularly. Try to improve the speed of implementation
Tip 2 : For System Design make a design of any problem by yourself first and then try to find flaws in it
Tip 3 : Try to apply in various companies at a time instead of relying on a single organization. This releases the pressure.

Application process
Where: Linkedin
Eligibility: No criteria
Resume Tip
Resume tip

Tip 1 : Make it only for 1 page
Tip 2 : Don't put any skill which you can't back during the interview

Interview rounds

01
Round
Medium
Face to Face
Duration60 Minutes
Interview date7 Apr 2021
Coding problem2

Round was taken by a senior developer . Google doc was provided to write the solutions for the problems asked.

1. Maximum Consecutive Ones

Easy
0/40
Asked in companies
AmazonOlaZivost Technologies

You are given an array ‘ARR’ of length ‘N’ consisting of only ‘0’s and ‘1’s. Your task is to determine the maximum length of the consecutive number of 1’s.


For Example:
ARR = [0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1], here you can see the maximum length of consecutive 1’s is 3. Hence the answer is 3.
Try solving now

2. Word Ladder

Hard
10m average time
90% success
0/120
Asked in companies
OlaSalesforceDisney + Hotstar

You are given two strings BEGIN and END and an array of strings DICT. Your task is to find the length of the shortest transformation sequence from BEGIN to END such that in every transformation you can change exactly one alphabet and the word formed after each transformation must exist in DICT.

Note:

1. If there is no possible path to change BEGIN to END then just return -1.
2. All the words have the same length and contain only lowercase english alphabets.
3. The beginning word i.e. BEGIN will always be different from the end word i.e. END (BEGIN != END).
Problem approach

I gave the bfs solution. Interviewer then asked me about the time complexity and space complexity and then asked me to code this.

Try solving now
02
Round
Easy
Face to Face
Duration60 Minutes
Interview date7 Apr 2021
Coding problem1

Coder pad link as shared with a problem statement . Have to solve the problem and show the running code.

1. Letter Combinations of a Phone Number

Moderate
35m average time
65% success
0/80
Asked in companies
AmazonOlaGoldman Sachs

Given a string S containing digits from 2 to 9 inclusive. Your task is to find all possible letter combinations that the number could represent.

A mapping from Digits to Letters (just like in Nokia 1100) is shown below. Note that 1 does not map to any letter.

example

Problem approach

First explained the solution to the interviewer. Interviewer then asked me to solve the backtracking approach that I gave. Then we discussed on certain optimization around it.

Try solving now
03
Round
Easy
Face to Face
Duration60 Minutes
Interview date10 Apr 2021
Coding problem1

A google doc was shared where we needed to explain our solution.

1. System Design Question

Suppose someone is trying to perform a DDOS attack on your service. You need to block requests from IPs from which number of requests are breaching threshold count in last 5 mins. 

Basically design a rate limiter.

Problem approach

Tip 1 : Make sure you list down the requirements.
Tip 2 : Make sure you first make the interviewer understand the functioning of your approach first and then give the design description.
Tip 3 : Make it a discussion where interviewer might ask you to make required changes in your design.

04
Round
Easy
Face to Face
Duration60 Minutes
Interview date13 Apr 2021
Coding problem1

Hiring Manager Round. This was mostly about my past projects and the skill set I have with a new problem statement.

1. Word Search - l

Moderate
30m average time
60% success
0/80
Asked in companies
OlaGoldman SachsIBM

You are given a 2D board('N' rows and 'M' columns) of characters and a string 'word'.


Your task is to return true if the given word exists in the grid, else return false. The word can be constructed from letters of sequentially adjacent cells, where adjacent cells are horizontally or vertically neighboring.


Note:
The same letter cell should not be used more than once.
For Example:
For a given word “design” and the given 2D board 
[[q’, ‘v’, ‘m’, ‘h’],
 [‘d’, ‘e’, ‘s’, ‘i’],
 [‘d’, ‘g’, ‘f’, ‘g’],
 [‘e’, ‘c’, ‘p’, ‘n’]]

The word design can be formed by sequentially adjacent cells as shown by the highlighted color in the 2nd row and last column.

board

Problem approach

I gave the multiple source bfs approach . Latter we discussed with trie approach if we are allowed to do preprocessing on the grid

Try solving now

Here's your problem of the day

Solving this problem will increase your chance to get selected in this company

Skill covered: Programming

How do you remove whitespace from the start of a string?

Choose another skill to practice
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